Art and Mimesis in Plato’s ‘Republic’

M.F. Burnyeat

Plato is famous for having banished poetry and poets from the ideal city of the Republic. But he did no such thing. On the contrary, poetry – the right sort of poetry – will be a pervasive presence in the society he describes. Yes, he did banish Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes – the greatest names of Greek literature. But not because they were poets. He banished them because they produced the wrong sort of poetry. To rebut Plato’s critique of poetry, what is needed is not a defence of poetry, but a defence of the freedom of poets to write as, and what, they wish.

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Vol. 20 No. 10 · 21 May 1998 » M.F. Burnyeat » Art and Mimesis in Plato’s ‘Republic’ (print version)
Pages 3-9 | 9754 words

Letters

From Charles Simic

There are a great many things to say about M.F. Burnyeat’s brilliant piece on Plato’s Republic (LRB, 21 May), but for someone like me, brought up under Communism, what stands out immediately is the similarity of Plato’s ideas to those of Stalin. The difference is that the dictator understood, and the philosopher did not, that to turn poets and writers into ‘engineers of the human soul’ one must have prison camps and firing squads.

Charles Simic
Strafford, New Hampshire

From M.F. Burnyeat

Charles Simic (Letters, 2 July) is right to see similarity between Plato’s ideas and Stalin’s. With characteristic effrontery, Plato actually cites great wickedness as proof that, given the right education, you can produce people with the talents and virtues needed to rule the ideal city: ‘It is the best endowed souls, is it not, who become outstandingly bad when they receive a bad education. Great crimes and pure wickedness come from a vigorous nature corrupted by its upbringing. A weak nature is incapable of either great good or great evil.’ According to Plato, if Stalin had been brought up in the ideal city, he would have become a paragon of virtue.

Plato wants Utopia to be brought about by persuasion and argument, not revolutionary force, which he deplored. He is not imagining a philosopher taking over a modern nation state, but the founding of a new city. That was not an unusual event in the Greek world, and it is important that, by our standards, Greek cities were very small. To get the right perspective on Plato’s project, we might think of the communities that Shakers and other groups founded in New England. Maybe in Maine, where Simic writes his wonderful and disturbing poems.

M.F. Burnyeat
All Souls College, Oxford

From Lesley Chamberlain

Readers who enjoyed Charles Simic’s comparison of Plato’s ideas with those of Stalin (Letters, 2 July) may be interested in Solzhenitsyn’s reflections, in The First Circle, on the intellectuals who lived in the ‘soft’ prison of Mavrino. Forcibly detached from their families and the pursuit of all ordinary satisfactions, and with nothing remaining but to devote themselves to friendship and the consideration of timeless things, they may – he believes – have been the first people in history to realise what Plato meant by excellence: ‘They were not hungry and not full. They were not happy and therefore not disturbed by the prospect of forfeiting happiness … A spirit of manly friendship and philosophy hovered over the sail-shaped vault of the ceiling. Was this perhaps that state of bliss which all the philosophers of antiquity tried in vain to define and describe?’ On my reading of D.M. Thomas’s biography, Solzhenitsyn, once free, tried ever after to re-create the prison atmosphere around him so that he could continue to benefit from that ‘excellent’ ascetic discipline.

Lesley Chamberlain
London SW12